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"Tatort" actresses Christina Hecke (left) and Tatjana Nekrasov: family and other crimes
Photo: Benoît Linder / SWR
Men in the rush hour of their lives are a security risk.
race down the career highway without looking left or right;
When planning a family, they push everything they see as an obstacle out of the way.
The lawyer Ben Dellien (Nicholas Reinke) is also such a runabout: in the law firm, the career leap to a partner is imminent and in the family the third child is born.
Bourgeois happiness nearing completion.
But on the way home from the office, during a last cell phone call with the colleague, the lawyer hits a homeless man who is pushing his bicycle along the side of the dark country road.
A dull bang;
Dellien gets out, shudders, hesitates and staggers back into the car to speed away.
The victim remains, as the coroner later reconstructs, lying helpless like a beetle on his back on the side of the road and bleeding to death internally.
But after the hit-and-run, the lawyer pulls the covers over his head at home - and hopes that the whole thing will turn out to be a bad dream the next morning.
And indeed, after waking up in the luxury home, the bourgeois optimization machine runs as smoothly as if nothing had happened.
Children are taken to school, important meetings are held.
As a precaution, Dellien drives the car through the car wash to remove possible traces.
Crime from the perpetrator's perspective
How then, despite all the cover-up actionism, a remaining trace leads the Stuttgart Thorsten Lannert (Richy Müller) and Sebastian Bootz (Felix Klare) to happiness in prosperity, that is elegantly and psychologically precisely staged in this crime story, which is largely told from the perpetrator's perspective set.
You almost feel sorry for the killer.
But only almost.
In 2015, the director and author Niki Stein had already condensed the events surrounding the Stuttgart 21 construction project into an expansive fictionalized corruption tableau for the Stuttgart »Tatort« team, which called the then mayor Fritz Kuhn into action.
He was concerned about the city's image, which had been described and portrayed in the detective story as a »shithole«.
In Stein's new "crime scene" Stuttgart now looks so tiptoppi that nobody can really complain.
Make breakfast, cover up crimes
The living environment alone, into which the saturated happiness of the career lawyer pours itself: facades made of glass let the sun in, open passages between all living levels create a transparent communal experience in which there can be no secrets.
Happiness here is a joint effort to achieve success, for which both spouses pull together.
And so, as a matter of course, Dellien's heavily pregnant and patent wife (Christina Hecke) soon takes over the cover-up of the murderous hit-and-run along with preparing breakfast for the kids on her to-do list.
In many ways, Stein's The Murderer in Me is reminiscent of Claude Chabrol's 1971 classic Before Nightfall.
Here, too, we follow a murderer through his bourgeois life, which is determined by rituals and runs like clockwork despite all external and internal shocks;
the knowing and patient wife also plays an active role at Chabrol.
This is now being taken to the extreme in the »crime scene«: while the lawyer, the rush-hour wreck, is trying clumsily and exhaustedly to cover up guilt, the wife, who is about to give birth, shows initiative.
Charming how she takes on the cover-up management.
Just a few hours before it goes to the delivery room, she rebukes the man on the hospital phone in a martial Swabian singsong that he has to pull himself together to defy the increasingly tough police with lies.
After all, it's about her marriage and her children.
That's how criminal a sense of family can be.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: The murderer in me",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first
